About

Think about what you wanted your MIT experience to be. For us, it was the opportunities to befriend and learn from students who were the best at what they did, whether that was winning international competitions or building nuclear reactors in their garage. It was thinking with gratitude about every person who invested in our success, big or small, and wanting to give a bit back. It was late nights in a dorm room, hacking something crazy with good friends, like a rocket or some electronics, or, dare we say, an MRI. It's the feeling that the impossible is possible.

There are a lot of amazing experiences at MIT — classes, clubs, UROPs, and established build teams — working towards a well-scoped, defined problem, where success is imminent. These are great places to build foundations and learn new skills. But we wanted a place for the dreamers who want to challenge the impossible and push the existing paradigms forward, a place where courage, initiative, and ownership is forged in the face of uncertainty.

This build team is our attempt to create that place. We have a base plan to start from, but most of our work will be greenfield research answering critical questions at the heart of the field, like how we can develop uniform magnetic fields at a fraction of the cost, or how useful images can be recovered with far less signal. Every idea or contribution you make could be something that future researchers and engineers will use when building the MRIs of the future. The way we are organized also encourages this: you get lots of chances to touch the whole system and make pivotal decisions about the shape of our research.

And most importantly, this build team is a way we can give back to a world that has given us so much. We think about our inspiring teachers from high school who struggled to afford medical bills. We think about the amazing hospitals that treated us when we were kids, and how so many in the world cannot access them. We want to make a statement that MIT, a school brimming with people who will be the future of engineering and technology, cares.

We want to build a state-of-the-art low-field MRI. We cannot guarantee that a student build team will solve this problem. But we care enough that we believe it is worth trying.